Medical history

By the time Anna Mae Ericksen graduated in 1943, the Deaconess Hospital School of Nursing already had a long tradition of providing nurses to the Inland Northwest. From 1899 to 1980, the school educated more than 2,000 nurses who became part of the history and the health of the Inland Northwest and its residents.

On Tuesday, Deaconess Medical Center will dedicate a memorial to the school, a series of 20 museum-quality panels that tell the history of the hospital and its nurses. The memorial, to be permanently exhibited in the skywalk between the hospital and the Deaconess Health and Education Center, was donated by the Alumni Association of the Deaconess Hospital School of Nursing.

Tuesday’s dedication ceremony is by invitation only, but the exhibit includes everyone: It features photos of every nursing school graduate, as well as a replica of a letter, owned by the school, which was written by Florence Nightingale to a servant.

Ericksen is chairwoman of a committee of 12 alumni that raised nearly $60,000 for the memorial.

“Chairing this memorial wall committee will be the highlight of my professional career,” said Ericksen, 86, who will attend Tuesday’s dedication.

That is saying a great deal for a woman who has had such a significant influence on nursing and medical care in the Northwest.

Ericksen came to Spokane from southern Saskatchewan with a family fleeing the ravages of the Depression and the dust bowl that was the heart of North America.

When she was 20, Ericksen and her sister, Modelle, enrolled in the Deaconess School of Nursing with the help of a scholarship from the Spokane Business and Professional Women.

The school, like the hospital, had been founded by woman missionaries, or deaconesses, of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The hospital opened as the Maria Beard Deaconess Home of Spokane at 715 W. Fourth Ave. on Oct. 6, 1897. The 20-room building was named after the mother of Minnie Beard O’Neill, who with her husband, Franklin Pierce O’Neill, founded the hospital, according to the “The Deaconess Story,” written by Priscilla Gilkey and Margaret Crabtree and edited by Terren Roloff.

The nursing school opened two years later with six students who lived on the premises and worked 12-hour days, six days a week, with four hours off on Sundays, work permitting. Though there were two other hospitals, Sacred Heart and St. Luke’s, the three facilities struggled to keep pace with the booming mine and mill town, and Deaconess moved to new, larger facilities in 1907, 1919 and 1923, all on Fourth Avenue.

As the hospital grew, so did the school. Ericksen and her sister enrolled in 1940, two years after the Fair Labor Standards Act shortened the work week to 44 hours. Unmarried nursing students still lived on-site and were held to a strict moral standard by Mary Buob, a 1911 graduate of the school and the superintendent of nursing since 1923.

Nurses had a 10 p.m. curfew and were to be up and dressed for breakfast at 6:30 a.m. They wore blue and white striped dresses with stiff collars and cuffs and a white apron with bib. The “probies” got a cap after three months at school and a black stripe to put on it when they graduated.

Hair could not touch collars, shoes had to be clean and though it had been some time since sleeves rose above the elbow, the removable starched cuffs had to be worn with button out, not in.

“Any infringement and you were sent back to the dorm,” Ericksen said.

At 10 a.m., the young nurses walked uphill to classes at Spokane Junior College, which was roughly where Manito Shopping Center is today, Ericksen said.

“We could take the street car back because we had to be on duty at 3 p.m.,” she recalled.

Nursing students also attended classes taught by a priest at Gonzaga University, “which was innovative for a Methodist hospital,” Ericksen said. She and her sister would walk from Gonzaga to the Fern Candy Co. on Riverside to get ice cream after class.

Their first year, the Ericksens lived in Abernathy Hall, one of the houses owned by Deaconess along Fifth Avenue. A house mother kept track of their comings and goings.

Ericksen remembers a senior student with a boyfriend recruited the sisters to put a ladder up to her bedroom window so she could sneak out after curfew.

“Oh, if we had been caught …,” Ericksen said.

Back then, the students used to sneak out after 10 p.m. to go to the nearby roller rink. Later the student nurses moved to Letterman Landing Hall, which exists today as offices for the medical center.

When Ericksen graduated in 1943 with a class of 14, the United States was knee-deep in World War II and both doctors and nurses were in short supply. Ericksen joined the Army Nurse Corps and was stationed at Kelly Field (now Kelly Air Force Base) near San Antonio until 1947.

Ericksen returned to Deaconess and in 1948 she became head nurse in the emergency department. That year the Washington Nurses Association asked the Washington Hospital Association to raise nurses’ pay to $228 for a 40-hour work week. In 1952, Louise Fairchild became the 1,000th graduate of the school and a year later, Lester Kenline became the first male graduate.

In the 1960s, Spokane became a “medical Mecca.” Medicare was established and in 1965, Deaconess started the first cardiopulmonary school in the nation. That was the year Kathy Higgins graduated from the nursing school. Students were still required to live on campus.

“That’s part of the reason all of us bonded so much,” said Higgins, 62, a committee member.

She remembers the strict moral code, the 10 p.m. curfew, “come hell or high water,” and knocking on windows to be let in the dormitory after hours. She lived in Letterman Lanning Hall as a freshman and Sherwood Hall, now the Women’s Health Center, her junior and senior year.

The uniform was a below-the-knee, blue and white cotton-polyester pinstriped frock with a white collar and buttons all the way down.

“We got capped after our first year,” she said, “and we wore our caps always. We got our pins when we were juniors, and when we graduated we got our black stripes.”

She recalls being bused to Whitworth College for classes and doing her internship at Eastern State Hospital. After the first year of learning the fundamentals, nursing students in the three-year program entered into specialty training. Higgins chose labor and delivery, which became a 39-year vocation.

Higgins retired last August from Sacred Heart. She also worked 10 years at Deaconess, one year at Valley Hospital and Medical Center and two-and-a-half years with HeartFlight. Her son got to ride along on her last flight, an experience that led him to become a helicopter pilot.

“What a rewarding career I had,” Higgins said. “People come up to me still to say, ‘Do you remember me? You helped deliver my baby.’ “

By the time Ericksen retired in 1988, she had co-founded the Spokane Poison Information Center in 1957 and served in numerous administrative roles at the hospital, including association director of nursing services, assistant to the administrator, director of regional outreach, director for physician liaison and supervisor of the emergency and outpatient departments.

“I don’t remember a day when I didn’t like coming to work,” she said. “I always wanted to be a nurse and so I was able to fulfill that dream.”

She credits her peers for helping her through her studies and Deaconess management for hiring her when she came back from the Army. She looks back on her career in nursing through times when a fractured hip left a patient crippled, hearses doubled as ambulances and moms stayed in the hospital for 10 days.

“To have had the privilege to have worked in those years and to see the wonderful advances and to have been part of it all,” she said, fills her with joy and pride. “Yeah, I was there. I was part of it.”